Con­dor takes off

The Howard Con­dor mower has be­come a top seller for the firm due to its slash­ing abil­ity

Howard Aus­tralia’s Con­dor mower, orig­i­nally des­tined for man­i­cured park­lands, is in­creas­ingly be­ing used for slasher work as coun­cils dis­cover its ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

At 3.5m wide – twice the width of an av­er­age mower – the Howard Con­dor mower han­dles heav­ier work well, “as long as you’re not try­ing to cut trees down with it”, Howard Aus­tralia de­sign en­gi­neer Robert Con­don says. “It’s good to get the best new tech­nol­ogy and ma­te­ri­als and work them into our ma­chines for the mar­ket here, and it’s good to see some­thing you’ve worked on per­form­ing out in the field so suc­cess­fully.”

“From the ev­er­last­ing Nugget to the con­trac­tor-tough EHD models, our slash­ers have long been re­garded as the best in the busi­ness,” Con­don says. “De­sign work for var­i­ous ma­chines in­clud­ing changes to re­flect new safety reg­u­la­tions, such as guards on slash­ers, has helped us to con­tin­u­ally im­prove.

“There were im­prove­ments to body de­sign to in­cor­po­rate new ma­te­ri­als and gal­vanis­ing, and other ar­eas of in­no­va­tive up­grad­ing for per­for­mance and size.”

In 2010, Con­don started work­ing on de­signs for a roller mower to suit the needs of coun­cils, schools, road­sides and parks. A winged roller mower, known back then as RLM350, is what Con­don de­scribes as the most tech­ni­cally com­pli­cated de­sign he had ever worked on. The RLM350 is now well-known as the Howard Con­dor.

Mow­ers aside, the com­pany’s most suc­cess­ful pro­ject over past years in dol­lar terms is the pro­duc­tion of Howard ro­tary hoes.

“Suc­cess­ful de­sign is al­ways a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort,” Con­don says. “There’s a great deal of knowl­edge out in the field, and we also had in­put from a very knowl­edge­able sales team, so we had a very clear idea of what was work­ing and how we could im­prove.

“The fact that Howard ma­chines built here in the 1970s are still out there and still go­ing strong has to be a tes­ta­ment to good de­sign.”

The Howard brand has been around since 1923, weath­er­ing changes in struc­ture, own­er­ship and mar­kets.